{"id":339,"date":"2015-01-20T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-01-21T01:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/madameshepard.com\/?p=339"},"modified":"2015-01-20T20:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T01:00:00","slug":"incorporating-authentic-resources-really","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/madameshepard.com\/?p=339","title":{"rendered":"Incorporating Authentic Resources \u2013 Do We Really Have To?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\u00a0 \u00a0In the past few weeks I have notice that several of my virtual colleagues have questioned the necessity of using authentic materials for interpretive tasks in their World Language classrooms.\u00a0\u00a0 Many fabulous language teachers have expressed their uncertainty about whether it is imperative to limit themselves to those materials that were written \u201cby members of the target culture for members of the target culture\u201d.\u00a0 Reading the blogs, Tweets, and Facebook posts of teachers whom I respect enormously led me to reflect about my own choice to rely almost exclusively on authentic materials in my classroom.<\/p>\n

One of the concerns that my colleagues have expressed is that finding appropriate resources is overly time-consuming. I can\u2019t disagree with this one.\u00a0 It does take a considerable amount of time to find just the right authentic document that will be accessible to our students, but still have the cultural and linguistic content that we are looking for.\u00a0 Although I don\u2019t have any magic fixes, I do have a couple of suggestions.\u00a0 Firstly, and most importantly, I think it\u2019s important to find the authentic resources FIRST.\u00a0 I suggest that before you write your Can-Do statement (or objective, standard, or goal), create a vocabulary list (if you do), create a vocabulary-building activity (if you do), prepare a grammar lesson (if you do), or write a quiz (if you do), etc., that you select the resources your students will read or listen to during the unit and on their Integrated Performance Assessment.\u00a0 \u00a0It is much easier to design lessons around the vocabulary and structures in an authentic text than it is to find resources that happen to have those items you had chosen in advance to focus on.\u00a0 This was a really scary paradigm shift for me.\u00a0 I was so afraid that I would accidentally \u201cleave something out\u201d if I didn\u2019t find a way to incorporate certain level-appropriate structures in each unit that I teach.\u00a0 I have slowly realized, though, that if a structure is important enough for students to know, it will usually appear in those materials which are appropriate to their proficiency level.\u00a0 My second suggestion for reducing research time is to establish a Pinterest board (or similar forum) for each thematic unit in your curriculum.\u00a0 Hundreds of other French teachers have spent endless hours looking for exactly what I need for each unit I teach and I\u2019m eternally grateful to them for archiving their resources in a way that allows me to benefit from all of their hard work.<\/p>\n

The second criticism that I have seen addressed is that students may become frustrated by having to interpret authentic texts.\u00a0 I think this is where the teacher\u2019s role is vital.\u00a0 We have to select texts that are appropriate to the proficiency level of our students. \u00a0Novice learners need lots of pictures, and only short sentences.\u00a0 I have found that infographics and picture books can be interpreted within a few weeks of language study.\u00a0 Secondly, we need to choose appropriate tasks.\u00a0 The template designed by ACTFL (http:\/\/www.actfl.org\/publications\/guidelines-and-manuals\/implementing-integrated-performance-assessment<\/a> ) works really well in my classes.\u00a0 Although I don\u2019t use every section for each lesson (reserving the full template for IPA\u2019s), the open-ended nature of the tasks, as well as the focus on both top-down and bottom-up strategies have helped even reluctant readers to be very successful.\u00a0 I can honestly say that my students seldom complain about reading tasks that I assign and I think this is because of the confidence they\u2019ve gained by using the same strategies to approach increasingly complex texts.\u00a0 As a matter of fact, a level 1 student who has an IEP for a reading disability recently told me that she \u201clikes reading in French\u201d because she\u2019s \u201cgood at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The third reason that many teachers give for not relying on authentic materials is a belief that it just isn’t necessary, especially at lower levels.\u00a0 In my opinion, it is vital to expose students to authentic language from the beginning of their language study for the following reasons:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Authentic materials help students to understand the connection between what they\u2019re learning in class and the real world. When they read a text that was written for members of the target culture, they understand that French is not just an academic discipline that only exists within the classroom walls. When some of my French I students responded to post on a keypal site that I had assigned as an interpretive task, they made a connection that would never have happened if they had read descriptive paragraphs from a textbook.<\/li>\n
  2. I think that authentic materials are necessary to ensure that students are being exposed to relevant cultural content. As an American, I am not always familiar with the \u201cproducts, practices, perspectives\u201d that are pertinent to a unit of study. However, when the authentic resources that I choose will often provide the direction I need to introduce relevant cultural knowledge to my students.<\/li>\n
  3. In my opinion, students need to be exposed to language which is not entirely comprehensible. Each time we present our students with teacher- or publisher-created texts, we deny them the opportunity to develop the skills they need to interpret the non-familiar language in an authentic text. As I see it, there is little value in asking a student to demonstrate comprehension of a text that contains only previously-learned vocabulary and structures. Instead, the purpose of interpretive tasks is to use the context provided by the presence of some familiar language to acquire additional vocabulary and structures.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In closing, while we don\u2019t have to rely exclusively on authentic resources when designing our curricula, I think we owe it to our students to do the best we can to incorporate these materials whenever possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    \u00a0 \u00a0In the past few weeks I have notice that several of my virtual colleagues have questioned the necessity of using authentic materials for interpretive tasks in their World Language classrooms.\u00a0\u00a0 Many fabulous language teachers have expressed their uncertainty about whether it is imperative to limit themselves to those materials that were written \u201cby members […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"yoast_head":"\nIncorporating Authentic Resources \u2013 Do We Really Have To? - Madame's Musings<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/madameshepard.com\/?p=339\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Incorporating Authentic Resources \u2013 Do We Really Have To? 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